It’s been an unsteady 2023 for the Marvel Studios machine. With the overstuffed “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” that flopped at the box office and the listless “Secret Invasion” series representing the nadir of the MCU for many, there was a legitimate question as to whether the superhero factory’s best days are over.

The answer: Probably. But that doesn’t mean Marvel can’t make the occasional home run like this summer’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” or a solid base hit like this week’s Season 2 premiere of “Loki.”

Arriving more than two years after its debut season cliffhanger, this new batch of six episodes is a rousing reminder of what made the spinoff a standout from the Marvel pack. It uses the episodic format far more effectively in terms of pacing and payoff than other recent Marvel Disney+ offerings (looking at you, “Moon Knight”).

Tom Hiddleston is back as the title character, a time-lost variant of Loki created as a result of events in 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” who ended up in the hands of the Time Variance Authority, a massive, bureaucratic organization tasked with “pruning” alternate realities and maintaining what is referred to as “The Sacred Timeline.”

在之前做了一个城堡end of time, Loki and his female variant Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) encountered the mastermind behind the shadowy organization, known as He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors). Then, despite Loki’s attempts to sway Sylvie, she swiftly slays him and in the process unleashes a slew of alternate timelines.

In a novel twist, the second season places chaos agent Loki in the position of trying to preserve the TVA’s status quo, lest something far worse rise up and replace it. To accomplish this, he once again teams up with world-weary TVA clock-watcher Mobius (Owen Wilson) in search of Sylvie to learn just how much damage she’s done.

It all risks getting a bit convoluted at times, but the buddy cop banter between Hiddleston and Wilson helps keep things light without ever losing sight of the stakes. Hiddleston’s terrific chemistry with Di Martino also gives the series its emotional through line.

After first playing He Who Remains in “Loki” and the evil Kang in “Quantumania,” Majors is also back, but this time as another variant. It remains to be seen if Kang will be reprised here, but there’s an ongoing thread about former TVA administrator Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), Kang’s comic book love interest, that may well resonate past this show. While Majors has been positioned as Marvel’s next Thanos-level big bad, after his arrest for assault in March, there’s no telling whether his current legal issues will impact any of his roles in the MCU.

Meanwhile, newcomers this season include freshly minted Oscar winnerKe Huy Quan(“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) as Ouroborous, the TVA’s quirky technician, and East Bay native拉斐尔有格的(“Blindspotting”) as a rogue TVA agent who prefers life on the outside, who round out a very talented ensemble cast.

But ultimately, “Loki” rises or falls based on the man in the title role.

It’s remarkable how Hiddleston, now in his second decade playing the God of Mischief after making his debut in 2011’s “Thor,” continues to find unexcavated layers of pathos and complexity in the fan-favorite former villain.

Sure, sometimes it’s good to be bad, but watching someone struggle to be good can often be just as compelling.

Zaki Hasan is a freelance writer.